Nicola Sturgeon is at the centre of a bitter argument with Scotland’s biggest
conservation charities, who are frustrated at her government’s relentless
support for wind energy.
The first minister, who vowed to “cement the growth” of Scotland’s wind
sector, this morning finds herself under attack from the National Trust for
Scotland, RSPB Scotland, Ramblers Scotland and six other respected campaign
groups, representing more than 400,000 members.
With more than 4,300 turbines already built or approved in Scotland, the
organisations urged the government to ensure “absolut

Self-driving cars are — slowly and cautiously — moving away from the test track and meeting the British public. Earlier this month, a funny-looking electric shuttle bus steered itself round the concourse in front of the O2 in Greenwich carrying Vince Cable, the business secretary, and transport minister Claire Perry.
Cable rather nervously recalled that the launch of an earlier technology, the railways, had been marred when the Rocket ran over and killed William Huskisson, a former cabinet minister, at the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway in 1830.
That accident was the result

A social network that joins people across the world in prayer has attracted more than 33 million posts.
The Instapray smartphone app lets its users request prayers, pray for others and chat with fellow members online. The app is used mainly by Christians but it is open to all faiths.
Instapray claims to serve as “a positive alternative to other social networks, which can sometimes foster an atmosphere of ego-bolstering or divisive outbursts of intolerance”.
It is somewhat similar in design to Twitter, the microblogging platform, which presents users with a constantly updating stream of posts.

It has been 21 years since a computer beat the best human at draughts, and 18
years since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess. Now machines have
supplanted humans in a really hard discipline: classic video games.
Computer scientists have designed a program that can teach itself to play Pong,
Space Invaders and all the other arcade favourites.
While striving to beat an awkward teenager from the 1980s might seem like a
low bar, the real achievement, described in a paper in the journal Nature,
was that the program was given almost no information.
All it knew was how